Yahoo gets more traffic than Google for first time since ’11

WASHINGTON – There is some good news for Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer: Yahoo has topped Google in Web traffic for the first time since May 2011. Research firm comScore reported Yahoo logged 196.6 million unique visitors in July, compared with its rival’s 192.3 million.

The bump in traffic should be encouraging news for Mayer, a Google alumnus who has focused on overhauling Yahoo’s image in the year since she took the helm at the technology giant. When Mayer started at Yahoo last July, the company trailed Google by 5 million page views — with 163 million unique visitors to Google’s 190 million — and was fighting public perception that it would never catch up.

Yahoo slowly narrowed the gap with Google this year as Mayer focused on overhauling the company’s Web properties, such as its email service and the photo-sharing site Flickr.

“Those things matter,” said Andrew Lipsman, an analyst for comScore. “When a company can re-engage or re-spark interest, it has ancillary benefits” across the network.

Google and Yahoo are likely to continue to fight it out for the top spot, Lipsman said. For Yahoo, the numbers are particularly impressive because they do not include the firm’s acquisition of blogging site Tumblr, he said. If July’s numbers had included traffic to Tumblr, Yahoo would have seen about 6 million additional users, he said.

Mayer has said she aims to make Yahoo products daily habits for users, and she has ordered redesigns of many of the firm’s most used products. She also has cut less lucrative products, such as the early search engine Altavista, which Yahoo shuttered early last month.

Meanwhile, Mayer has gone on an acquisition run, including paying $1.1 billion for Tumblr in May. Over the past year, Yahoo has picked up more than 20 companies that could help inject new life into everything from the company’s ads to its mobile apps, which are a main focus for Yahoo and its competitors as Web users turn more frequently to smartphones and tablets.

Yahoo is currently in third place for mobile traffic, comScore reported, trailing Facebook and Google. But as the company revamps its products, its standing could improve.

Yahoo shares gained as much as 3.5 percent during Thursday trading ahead of a glitch that stopped trading on the Nasdaq. The stock closed up 3.1 percent at $27.90 a share.